Haroon Bilour’s assassination condemned

Remembering the victims of the suicide bombing at an Awami National Party’s electoral rally in Peshawar’s Yakatut area, civil society activists gathered outside Karachi Press Club on Wednesday and shouted slogans against terrorism and for peace.

The Karachi office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) organised the protest, in which a number of leading rights and civil society activists participated.

They carried banners inscribed with portraits of Haroon Bilour, an ANP leader who along with 19 other people was killed when the electoral rally was attacked by a suicide bomber. The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The HRCP’s Asad Iqbal Butt, the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research’s Karamat Ali, the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum’s Saeed Baloch, rights activists Naghma Shaikh, Nida Tanweer and Abubakkar Yousafzai and Qurrat Miraza were prominent among the participants.

Protesters expressed concern over the killing of innocent people in the bombing, and called upon all the political parties to devise a combined strategy to get rid of the menace of terrorism.

Criticising the government for its dubious policy of mainstreaming banned outfits, Butt said that the state should clear its minds regarding the militant groups and abandon its policy of “good and bad Taliban”.

“Polices adopted by our state in the 1980s pushed the country into a hell-like situation. Still it did not learn any lesson from its past mistakes,” Butt told protesters.

ANP’s meeting

Condemning the assassination of its leader, Haroon Bilour, and vowing to continue the fight against the scourge of terrorism, the Awami National Party’s Sindh chapter has convened a condolence gathering today at Baacha Khan Markaz, the party’s provincial headquarters, in Banaras area.

ANP central chief Asfandyar Wali on Wednesday announced three days of mourning over the killing of Haroon Bilour and 20 others. He also requested all political parties to suspend their election campaigns during this period.

Paying tributes to Bilour and his father Bashir Ahmed Bilour, who was also assassinated in a suicide bombing in 2012, ANP leaders said that the party workers were the followers of the Bacha Khan’s non-violence policy and they were not afraid of the nefarious designs of militants and attacks on people.

The ANP said that the death of Haroon Bilour and other innocent people in the suicide attack was a great tragedy and loss to the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.